Is it idolatrous to worship Fuji? Is it pagan to love its beauty, to feel one’s spirit freed for a brief moment, forgetful of experience tugging at one’s elbow, of caution, of fear, of expediency, of pride?
IS IT IDOLATROUS TO WORSHIP FUJI?
IX
THE INN AT KAMA-SUWA
The railway train with its sly befuddling through the luxury of speed has picked the traveller’s wallet. Cooped behind a smudged window, how can he sense the personality of the town he enters? One should stand in isolation on the heights above a city, and then follow down some path until within the streets one is absorbed by the throbbing life. (Hobo Jack, ipse dixit. And is this not true?)
To appreciate Kama-Suwa’s surcharge of culture, prosperity, and importance, the reader should think of a small city in Kansas (one of those temperate, prosperous, ideal cities of which one has a vividly exact idea without the proof or disproof from having visited it). I say this, knowing only the standardized impression of those ideal cities, but often a common, standardized impression may be more expeditious, not to say more valuable, or even more truthful, to communicate a comparison than the truth itself. Thus, by such a comparison let Kama-Suwa be known.
The Kama-Suwa streets are filled with good citizens; the shops are superior, the town has “as fine a school system as you could find anywhere”; the temple is “well supported”; and there are not any very poor people. Also the town has famous hot springs and famous views. In the age when Nature was distributing her gifts she favoured Suwa with excessive partiality, in anticipation, perhaps, of the future births of to-day’s appreciative, virtuous, honest, and industrious Kama-Suwans.
We had had a good report of a certain inn in the town and, after we reached the path around the shore, Hori went ahead on the bicycle to prepare the way. The machine’s parts were working together with remarkable smoothness that day, perhaps because its superfluous temper had been cooled down through its having been left out in a short, hard beating rain while we were taking refuge under a tree. We promised Hori to hurry, but we did not. The mountains overhanging the lake were responsible in the beginning for our forgetting our word, but we augmented that beginning by finding some cause for a violent argument, one of those tempestuous discussions which gain their heat from the insidious conceding of small points. An obstinate, unyielding opponent who stays put is a far more satisfactory antagonist. We were well into the town before we discovered that we were hemmed in by houses. The interruption which opened our eyes was a polite pulling at our sleeves. One waylayer, out of the many who had surrounded us, had cast away in despair the usual Japanese respect for not touching the person.